Your
Invitation to Unwrap the Gift
Big and glossy and loud and fast--that’s how
this bent-up world turns.
But God, when He comes--He shows up in this fetal ball.
He who carved the edges of the cosmos curved Himself into a fetal ball in
the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and lets His
cells divide, light splitting all white.
He gave up the heavens that were not even large enough to contain Him and
lets Himself be held in a hand.
The mystery so large becomes the Baby so small, and infinite God becomes
infant.
The Giver becomes the Gift, this quiet offering.
This heart beating in the chest cavity of a held child, a thrumming heart
beating hope, beating change, beating love, beating the singular song
you’ve been waiting for--that the whole dizzy planet’s been spinning round
waiting for.
Waiting.
Advent.
It comes from the Latin.
It means “coming.”
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When you open the pages of Scripture to read
of His coming, of this first Advent, before you ever read of the birth of
Jesus, you always have the genealogy of Jesus.
It’s the way the Gift unwraps: you have Christ’s family tree...before you
have a Christmas tree. If you don’t come to Christmas through Christ’s
family tree and you come into the Christmas story just at the Christmas tree—this
is hard, to understand the meaning of His coming.
Because without the genealogy of Christ, the limbs of His past, the
branches of His family, the love story of His heart that has been coming
for you since before the beginning--how does Christmas and its tree stand?
Its roots would be sheared. Its meaning would be stunted. The arresting
pause of the miracle would be lost.
Because in the time of prophets and kings, the time of Mary and Joseph, it
wasn’t your line of credit, line of work, or line of accomplishments that
explained who you were. It was your family line. It was family that
mattered. Family gives you context, and origin gives you understanding, and
the family tree of Christ always gives you hope.
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The coming of Christ was right through
families of messed-up monarchs and battling brothers, through affairs and
adultery and more than a feud or two, through skeletons in closets and
cheaters at tables. It was in that time of prophets and kings, the time of
Mary and Joseph, that men were in genealogies and women were invisible. But
for Jesus, women had names and stories and lives that mattered.
The family tree of Christ startlingly notes not one woman but four. Four
broken women--women who felt like outsiders, like has-beens, like never-beens.
Women who were weary of being taken advantage of, of being unnoticed and
uncherished and unappreciated; women who didn’t fit in, who didn’t know how
to keep going, what to believe, where to go--women who had thought about
giving up. And Jesus claims exactly these who are wandering and wondering
and wounded and worn out as His. He grafts you into His line and His
story and His heart, and He gives you His name, His lineage, His
righteousness. He graces you with plain grace...
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...In this day, this season, miracles will
grow within, unfurl, bear fruit.
And the heart that makes time and space for Him to come will be a glorious
place.
A place of sheer, radiant defiance in the face of a world careening mad and
stressed.
Because each day of Advent, we will actively wait.
We will wait knowing that the remaking of everything has already begun.
We will linger over the lines of the Old Testament stories, tracing the
branches of the family tree of Christ, the spreading pageantry of
humankind, from Adam to the Messiah--each historical truth pointing to the
coming, the already relief, the incarnation of God.
We’ll still and slow and trace each exquisite ornament pictured with these
twenty-five Advent narratives, each ornament cut slow out of paper.
And there He is--the exquisite Gift cut and given for us, broken.
The Gift who hung on a Tree for us, cut off.
The Gift who was pierced for you, wounded--your wounded, willing God, who
unfolds Himself on the Tree as your endless, greatest
Gift.
-Ann Voskamp
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